


take the dive

by meltingheart



Series: favorites [1]
Category: SHINee
Genre: M/M, Pre-Relationship, Spring 2017, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 14:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19336213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meltingheart/pseuds/meltingheart
Summary: I'm planning to write more of this, but the narrative I have in mind is pretty long-form and mature. If I upload more, it will be added as new chapters to this work, and the rating will change as the plot and subject matter progresses. But this felt like a good little tidbit to upload by itself. Hope you enjoy.I'm writing a lot of longer stories at the moment, including two for the Summer of SHINee fanfiction fest that some of you may know about. Very excited to bring those to AO3 when the fest is wrapping up! :-]





	take the dive

The Pacific is bigger than the small gulfs surrounding the Korean Peninsula on almost every side, though it’s impossible to explain how obvious it feels. The coastline is more dramatic here, steep cliffs and arches connecting to pillars of rock standing strong against the oncoming waves. Everything is purposefully big, full of a gravitas that can’t be ignored, no matter how subtle it is. Those waves that crash against its shores aren’t too powerful today, but they carry an understated energy in them. They could be raging, if they wanted to. It’s quiet today, but it could be loud tomorrow. 

 

Jonghyun breathes in deep, soaks in the salty tang of ocean air. It’s fresh, nice after so many weeks spent in airports and in hotel rooms and in city centers. There’s barely any time to get a moment to himself, for now, busy busy busy, but this is good for what it is. He feels more grounded in this moment, on the high cliff of a foreign shoreline, than he has in months. 

 

It makes him want to write. He wants to pen down lyrics like he’s going to go insane if the ink doesn’t flow in perfect time with the stream of his thoughts.

 

There’s no time, though. No time at all. Just like there’s no time for anything, these days. The cameramen will be ready for him again in a few minutes, and his salt-sticky wind-tousled hair will be redone by stylists who huff too much about doing their jobs. His words will be lost again under the waves of activity, crashing against him one by one until they’re gone. 

 

When he’s shuffled back down the cliffside’s winding trail and onto the shore for the next shooting, the wind whips away all his thoughts with it. Two events’ photoshoots to clear in a day, the snapping of shutters that he still cowers from inside, only hours left until sunset and he can be shuffled away into his motel room. 

 

A melody sneaks its way behind all that, beneath the sound of the wind in his ears. It’s uncalled for, that simple guitar demo that the company had sent him to play around with. There’s no words yet, but a feeling comes along with it. He can’t shut it out, can’t ignore it. 

 

And he can’t be shuffled into his room fast enough, whipping out his phone as soon as the shoot ends so he can type down notes as fast as his sometimes clumsy fingers let him.

 

* * *

 

It’s definitely going to have an ocean theme, Jonghyun considers as he stares out of the window seat at the vast blue beneath him. It’s the only thing that makes sense, now that he’s had the tune in his head through so many more days of seaside shootings. The guitar was there on the beach, at the villa, strumming in time with the cawing of gulls, overlying every distant crashing wave. That demo kept looping through, kept him awake all through the rest of the shooting, even during hours where he was supposed to sleep. 

 

Lucky for him, those were exactly the hours that the members and everyone else living where he should be were typically awake. He’d spent every one of the last few nights texting with Minho and Jinki, the only two who would bother answering him back. 

 

Texting over a long period with Jinki had been particularly interesting. 

 

They were close; how could they not be? But they saw each other so often, texting was usually unnecessary. Jinki was the type to save it until he could say it, and Jonghyun had never actually minded his flurried, infrequent messages going unresponded to. Texting being the only reliable way to speak to each other was a change they’d never been through. It was decidedly new to figure out the quirks Jinki typed with, showing himself in ways he wouldn’t face-to-face, to have the read receipt pop up seconds after every message he sent, to be the only one receiving his quaint, esoteric observations of nature. 

 

Jonghyun had felt thrown off by it at first, this Jinki that was new in a way he’d never expected. But it was interesting, and he wanted more. More and more until this piece’s shape fit itself into the puzzle Jinki was. Jonghyun typed until he passed out on the keyboard, sending keysmashes and typos while Jinki cheated on his diet and snuck greasy street food for lunch on the other side of the ocean.

 

That ocean framed by his window, blue and blue and blue for miles, suddenly reminds him of Jinki, too. It’s adaptable, quiet until it wants to dig in and carve its own spaces. An unstoppable deep flow that he wants to hold in his hands and examine in the shallow cup of his palm until it finally makes sense. Sometimes it felt like he could see through Jinki to the very bottom of who he was, and at other times, it was like staring into the abyss, just waiting for something familiar to stare back. But even that much was familiar. 

 

If you spend every day together for thirteen years, even the ones where you’re apart, you learn almost all their faces.  _ Almost  _ being the key word. 

 

Familiarity is too easy, after so long spent reading the faces Jinki tried to hide and turning his own towards the camera, being flashy so Jinki wouldn’t have to bring himself up from the deep of his mind and drown when he found himself unable to sink back into it. He had known for so long how to be the light on top of Jinki’s waves, to distract and bounce off him in ways that appealed. 

 

Jonghyun wants something more than that familiarity. He wants to immerse himself until he knows every edge and depth of the abyss, until everything expected becomes unexpected, until he learns to breathe something that’s not air. Something that’s just Jinki. When he learns what composes just Jinki. 

 

This demo - it’s not his, not yet. He didn’t compose it, after all. But he wants to fit himself to it, drape himself on top like the way the light contours to waves, weave himself below the surface as deep as he can go, until no one can tell that either still exists without the other. 

 

He huffs a quiet laugh to himself. An album coming out in the next few weeks, and here he is already working on the next one, when he could save it for the long inactivity periods in his schedule later on. Jonghyun fishes his phone out of his sweatpants pocket anyways, opens up the notes app. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm planning to write more of this, but the narrative I have in mind is pretty long-form and mature. If I upload more, it will be added as new chapters to this work, and the rating will change as the plot and subject matter progresses. But this felt like a good little tidbit to upload by itself. Hope you enjoy.
> 
> I'm writing a lot of longer stories at the moment, including two for the Summer of SHINee fanfiction fest that some of you may know about. Very excited to bring those to AO3 when the fest is wrapping up! :-]


End file.
